Pfft, I’ve taken my car from 26k miles to 50k miles in 18 months – it drives exactly the same as when it was new.
It just been to the dealership for their top of the range service which includes a full vehicle check – which is code for “we’ll try to scare you into replacing anything that even slightly worn, and a few things that aren’t”. They came back with 2 tyres that were legal, but not brand new, rear wiper blade and rear pads and discs. Cost about £250 to have it all done and now as far as they’re concerned the vehicle is perfect. The interior shows not a single sign of wear, the exterior is perfect bar a scratch some careless **** did in Tesco with his/her door.
Mate of mine, handed over this Audi A4 (boo hiss) to his sister a couple of years ago, it had reached the point where it was all but worthless commercially but actually drove well – it was on 250k miles, it’s now on 300k miles and still drives well, he did have it serviced on the lights and once had to have the head rebuilt after a spark plug failed and got eaten by a valve – but that was the fault of the plug, not the car.
The ‘trick’ is to not let them degrade too much, I hear people scraping 10 year old cars, even newer because it’s needs this, and that and whatever else – the MOT man has been mean this year and failed it on a dozen things – but they didn’t all go at once, they just put up with them until more things went wrong and then more – often caused because they didn’t fix the first issue and hey presto you’ve got a car that’s no longer worth fixing. Terrible waste of something that costs so much resources to build in the first place.